Like Gridlines, Guides also allow you to
position and snap your slide objects in place. For most professional slide designers, creating slides without guides would be very worrisome! When guides are enabled for the first time within PowerPoint, you can just see two guides by
default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect exactly at the center of the slide,
as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Guides on a PowerPoint slide

By default, guides may not be visible at all on your slides. Making them visible though can help while working with positioning any of your
slide objects. Also if you need to position certain objects at the same position on successive slides, guides can be an amazing help! In
successive tutorials, we will explore techniques that help you
working with guides, or even
adding more guides. In this tutorial, you will learn how to
get started with guides by showing or hiding them in PowerPoint 2016:

Launch PowerPoint 2016, and open a Blank Presentation as shown
in Figure 2. Note that there are no guides visible by default.

Figure 2: Default PowerPoint interface with no Guides visible

To enable the guides, select the View tab of the
Ribbon, and make sure you select the Guides
check-box,
as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3.

Figure 3: Guides check-box selected

Conversely, if you want to hide guides again, just deselect the Guides check-box (refer to Figure 3).

Tip: To turn on the visibility of the guides, you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt + F9. Use the same
shortcut key to toggle it away. Want more keyboard shortcuts? Get a copy of our
PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts Ebook.

Now you can see the guides displayed on the slide as shown in Figure 4.

Have your ever used keyboard shortcuts and sequences in PowerPoint? Or are you a complete keyboard aficionado?
Do you want to learn about some new shortcuts? Or do you want to know if your favorite keyboard shortcuts are documented?